In a September 25th tweet, NARAL Pro-Choice America sought to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their founding in 1969 by sharing the timeline of the pro-abortion organization’s “milestones.” But the tweet and timeline conveniently left out the true beginnings of the group, including the men who pushed the abortion agenda on the feminists who didn’t really want it.
“Since our founding in 1969, NARAL has been at the forefront of the fight for #ReproFreedom,” said the tweet. “An organization that started with 4 women has grown to over 2.5M Americans committed to action, power, and freedom. Which milestones were you there for?” It then links to their timeline.
Since our founding in 1969, NARAL has been at the forefront of the fight for #ReproFreedom. An organization that started with 4 women has grown to over 2.5M Americans committed to action, power, and freedom. Which milestones were you there for? https://t.co/IDX9FiVZWd #NARAL50 pic.twitter.com/z3p5IAi9Cn
— NARAL (@NARAL) September 25, 2019
The truth? NARAL was founded as the National Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws by not just women, but men, including Larry Lader and Dr. Bernard Nathanson, as previously reported by Live Action News’ Carole Novielli. Lader (known as the “father of the abortion rights movement“) and Nathanson (a prolific abortionist) worked together to take the women’s movement that was underway in the United States and weave abortion into its agenda, focusing on the National Organization for Women run by Betty Friedan.
The women’s movement of the 1960s was centered on equality for women, especially in the workplace, at a time when women were being fired for becoming pregnant. They weren’t allowed to attend college in some areas and were practically shut out of professions like medicine and law.
“In 1963, that was the relaunch of the women’s movement in the 20th Century. People don’t remember how bad it was for women,” Sue Ellen Browder, author of the book “Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement,” told Live Action President and Founder Lila Rose.
READ: 8 ways pro-abortion men pushed legalized abortion on America
Abortion was not necessarily on the minds of the women running the movement for equality. They saw it as a divisive issue for women. Friedan herself was not even in favor of abortion. Her book, “The Feminine Mystique” didn’t mention it in its first publication and she has been quoted as saying, “Ideologically, I was never for abortion. Motherhood is a value to me, and even today abortion is not.” Additionally, she admitted that many of the founders of NOW had convinced her that abortion was “too controversial” to take on. However, Friedan said pro-abortion men pushed her to include abortion in her feminist “Bill of Rights.”
“I remember that there were some men – doctors, lawyers – that had been trying to reform these criminal abortion laws,” she said. “And they got a sense somehow that the women’s movement might make everything different. They had gotten nowhere but they had a sense. So, they kept nagging at me, to NOW, to do something….”
She went on to say that after “it was clear that NOW wasn’t going to [promote abortion] in those first years,” Lader and Nathanson began to pressure her all the more. Friedan was hesitant because she feared, correctly, that it would split the women’s movement. But she eventually helped found and establish NARAL at the First National Conference on Abortion Laws held in Chicago in 1969 along with Lader and Nathanson. She said very few women attended. Twelve people were elected for the Planning Committee for NARAL, and that included seven women and five men. But Lader knew that in order to convince Americans that abortion was about equality for women, they had to keep the women at the forefront.
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“We’ve got to keep the women out front,” Lader told Nathanson according to Browder. “[…] and some Blacks. Black women especially. Why are they so damn slow to see the importance of this whole movement to themselves?”
Today, NARAL is still apparently attempting to hide from America the men who created the organization. It fails to make mention of any of these men on the timeline on their website. Instead, it focuses on a group of three women who had formed the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws — a separate group from Friedan’s which focused solely on abortion — legalizing it, endorsing elective abortions, and helping women learn how to abort their own babies. None of the founding members of that group were on the Planning Committee for NARAL.
Why would NARAL try to hide a big part of their history? One reason could be that today’s “feminists” seem to have a serious distaste for men, often telling them that they should have no say in the debate on abortion. Another reason could be that Nathanson eventually became pro-life and admitted that the entire fight to legalize abortion was based on lies, including the fabricated statistics about women dying from illegal abortions prior to Roe v. Wade.
“We aroused enough sympathy to see our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000,” he explained. “Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure constantly fed to the media was 10,000.”
It’s the same strategy the abortion industry continues to use today to convince Americans that abortion is necessary. With NARAL’s false timeline, they are continuing to lie to Americans by covering up the truth that it was pro-abortion men who wanted to legalize abortion in America and strongly pushed the idea among the women’s movement – dividing women instead of uniting them. Today women can have an abortion at any time, for any reason — yet they still face discrimination for being pregnant.
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